[Sugar-devel] Had a chance to try SoaS in anger...

[Gary C Martin]

... and it worked :-)

Just back from a 3hr+ meeting with a potential school deployment,  
they'd contacted me a few weeks back regarding the desire for a 50 XO  
initial trial to improve e-learning skills (looking at about 100  
total). Email Q/A with him were good until OLPC dropped the 'change  
the world' program last week (killed off any new 100 laptop size  
deployments)...

Any way, seeing as I do have 3 OLPC development XOs here, and he was  
also interested when I mentioned the possibility of SoaS as an  
alternative for running Sugar, I went ahead with the demo. I took a  
chance and took a Soas-200902061045.iso USB SoaS, and also a live CD  
of it. Flying blind as neither of which can I actually test myself –  
I'm all PPC Mac – the CD I burnt with Disk Utility on the Mac, and the  
USB stick I danced a magic Fedora based XO dance (pleased to see no  
USB re-format was necessary).

He had 2 oldish laptops for the SoaS test, one could not boot from USB  
(so we used the CD on it), the other had a BIOS option for USB  
Harddisk which turned out to work great. CD booting was quite slow (as  
expected) perhaps twice as slow as booting a real XO. USB booting was  
real fast (perhaps two or three times faster than a real XO - but I  
didn't time it).

- Both machines ran Sugar very quickly to what I'm used to (vs. the XOs)
- The neighborhood showed lots of wireless APs, but unfortunately  
would not associate with any (just pulsed for a bit, no password  
dialogue)
- No sound support (was trying to demo eToys car honking code at one  
point)
- Laptop displays both correctly auto powered off after usual idle time
- Both seemed to be showing the correct battery level status in their  
device frames
- Write would have been nice to show on the larger laptop screens, but  
doesn't launch (known missing libraries)
- Turtle Art looks great on the big screen :-)
- Tried to resume some journal entries during the demo (USB booted  
machine) but the Journal entries just vanished from the journal as  
they were clicked
- Both machines had sporadic semi-corrupt graphics on seemingly random  
icons/widgets, I assumed some low level gfx drive issue. Not many  
glitches, just a few.
- No crashes for either machine, both were running for at least  
several hours.
- Fonts were not quite large enough, but were at least readable :-)

PC Laptop specs were:

	Compaq nx9030 HP
	Intel pentium M 1.73Ghz
	1.2Gb ram

	Compaq nx6110 HP
	Intel pentium M 1.73Ghz
	512Mb ram

He knew that SoaS was very much a work in development, but was very  
pleased to see it working (and has taken a copy of the .iso to demo to  
others involved).

Most time was spent on the XO's showing off the mesh collaboration  
features (write, maze, colors!, distance are great for this), music,  
speech etc, and going through most of the activities I'd had installed  
(~20-30) – so he got to see a stable Sugar with 'all the bits' working  
as well as the pre-release SoaS taster.

Just thought I should post,
--Gary